[229] the frenzied, murderous mob. Captain Snyder was dressed in beautiful black, with white vest; magnificent head covered with rich wavy locks that fell around his broad shoulders like the mane of a lion. When the mercenaries were preparing to consummate this horrible crime, they at last seemed conscious of the character and the magnitude of this awful work, grew pale and trembled: even the brutal Strachan seemed alarmed at his own nameless and compounded crimes of lust, avarice and murder. Rev. Mr. Rhodes, a meek and unobtrusive minister of the Baptist Church, prayed with the dying men, and Strachan reached out his bloody hands to bid them adieu. They generously forgave their murderers.
To lengthen out the cruel tragedy, the guns were fired at different times that death might be dealt out in broken periods. Two of the men were killed outright. Captain Snyder sprang to his feet faced the soldiers, pierced their cowardly faces with his unbandaged eagle eye, and fell forward to rise no more.
The other seven were wounded, mangled and butchered in detail, with pistols; whilst the ear was rent with their piteous groans, praying to find refuge in death. The whole butchery occupied some fifteen minutes.
The country was appalled at the recital of these crimes and incredulous of the facts.
The newspapers were suppressed to prevent their publication, and the exposure of the perpetrators. The punishment of the criminals was demanded by public justice and expected by everybody except the criminals, who well understood the cruelty land corruption of the Executive Department.
To cover up these crimes by a judicial farce, nearly two years afterwards charges were preferred against Strachan; he was convicted upon the foregoing state of facts, and sentence passed upon him. The sentence was remitted and Strachan promoted.
For this crime McNeil was promoted by Lincoln to Brigadier-General and kept in office. In all of the history of European wars, Asiatic butcheries, Indian cruelties, and negro atrocities, there can be found no parallel instance in which the murder of men without any of the forms of trial, was accompanied with the rape of the wives of those designated by the lottery of death as the price of the husband's liberty. There was nothing left undone to make the whole scene cruel, loathsome, and revolting.
This outrage unpunished, gave license for crime, cruelty, outrage and disorder everywhere. It would require the pen of every writer, the paper of every manufacturer, for a year, to recount them; the human imagination sickens in contemplation of them.
In the next year after the McNeil butchery, in the neighboring city of Hannibal, occurred a similar crime, equally monstrous in its details.
J. T. K. Heyward commanded a body of enrolled brigands in Marion county, known as the railroad brigade, who foraged upon the people and plundered the country.
